


Undying Reverie

by orphan_account



Category: Ratchet & Clank
Genre: Cultural Differences, Gen, Ratchet has an eight thousand word identity crisis lol, Tagged for death only because it centers around a funeral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27706193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Alister is dead. Using the resources at his disposal, Ratchet is determined to give him a traditional Lombax funeral.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Undying Reverie

**Author's Note:**

> hi! this fic is pretty self-indulgent, and mainly came from thoughts I was having about sir catboy here. either way, please enjoy!
> 
> warning: if you are uncomfortable with death, I do not recommend reading this! some segments are rather blunt about the topic and may be upsetting.

**PART I: MELTING GRIEF**

**On his voyage home from the Great Clock, Ratchet stepped into a cold puddle on Aphelion’s floor and broke out into a string of Veldinese curses.**

“It’s melting!” he called out. He shook the water off his boot and tried not to fall into a panic. “Clank, the ice is melting! How much longer until we get there?”

Clank’s voice came from the cockpit. “With our warp drive damaged, it will take another three hours by regular travel. I am afraid we cannot go any faster.”

Another mouthful of curses foreign to this galaxy exploded into the air. He ran his hand along his right ear and tried to think of solutions. Surely, in a ship designed and built by one of the most intelligent species in the galaxy, there would be a way to preserve something as basic as _ice_. Aphelion could defeat perilous pirates and vexatious Valkyries with laughable ease, but when it came to keeping something a little colder than room temperature, she was woefully unprepared? The ridiculousness of the oversight would be funny if the situation wasn’t so dire. 

His eyes rested on the metal storage unit in front of him. Now filled with ice, it was once overflowing with personal possessions from his voyages across the galaxies. His souvenirs were strewn across the floor, many of them broken in his mad rush to liberate the space inside the unit. With embarrassment, he recalled the way tears had blurred his vision as he ripped off the top of the storage bin and threw his belongings in every which direction, no longer caring about his memories because they felt so unimportant in the wake of what had just occurred in the Great Clock. 

At his feet, a cracked wooden statue from the ever-distant Eudora soaked in the puddle. The Solana galaxy was close to Polaris, but it had come to feel foreignly distant. Polaris had changed him, he supposed. The horrors exposed to him in this galaxy made those of others seem so miniscule in comparison. 

He broke away from the storage area and stepped into the cockpit. Clank, still too small for the passenger seat, stood on the cushion as he monitored the ship’s course progress. 

“How close is the nearest spaceport?” Ratchet asked. “They usually have ice, right? We should get some more.” 

Clank didn’t move his eyes away from the controls. “I believe you have entered the bargaining stage of grief, Ratchet.” 

He rolled his eyes. “I’m not entering the stages of grief over some melting ice cubes. Can we go to a spaceport or not?”

“The closest spaceport is over an hour away. I recommend that we continue on our current trajectory to Torren IV,” Clank replied. This time, his eyes shifted to look at Ratchet. “You should sit down. He will not melt away too, you know.”

With a huff, Ratchet collapsed into the pilot’s chair. He shut his eyes tight and breathed slowly, a shallow attempt to ground himself in reality. Azimuth’s body would not decompose into space dust in the three hours it took to get to Torren IV. When they arrived, Ratchet would open that storage container and Alister would remain frozen in place, eyes shut and fur still bright with colour and for a moment, an impossibly short moment, Ratchet’s brain would trick itself into thinking he was still alive. It would fire impulses into his arms to shake him awake, to tell him to get up, and he would remember only as he reached forward that no response would come from the corpse before him. 

_This is grief,_ he realized. It wasn’t a vague sense of sadness that haunted him in his darkest moments. It was forgetting that something was gone until he was pierced in the heart by reminders of its absence. 

As Aphelion soared through the stars, a mantra played through his mind. 

_Alister is dead. Alister is dead. Alister is dead._

_Please don’t forget, Ratchet._

_Alister is dead._

**PART II: THE VELDINESE LOMBAX.**

**Torren IV was a place where dead things came back to life.** Ratchet steered Aphelion around canyons filled with scraps, over settlements built from the ground up with recycled ship parts, and through mountain ranges dotted with solar panels to fuel the planet’s forever-striking battery bots. Everything was recycled, repurposed, and ultimately, resurrected. On Torren IV, parts long thought dead and abandoned found life again.

Really, it only made sense that Alister had found his second home here. Where else was a man sentenced to death and desperately holding on to life expected to settle?

Ratchet landed Aphelion in an open field near Alister’s old domicile. He popped open the cockpit window and slid off the side of the ship, falling a few feet before his boots hit the dusty ground. The gravity here was heavy—it pulled him down and made his body feel about twenty pounds heavier. How he ever learned to hoverboot here, he had no idea. The idea of jumping around platforms at high speeds in this gravitational context seemed needlessly labouring to him. 

Leaving Clank behind to keep an eye on the ice, Ratchet made his way to the base of the cliff Alister’s home was located on. Eyes to the sky, he stepped into the shadow casted by the hollowed-out robot mech that seemed to offer a warning on its own. _This is not a safe place. Come here, and you will be harmed_. It was no wonder the Vullard’s had never approached Alister while he was alive. Everything about him was relatively terrifying.

The grappling end of his swingshot attached itself to the cliff’s edge with a _click_. With a flick of his wrist, it carried him up into the air and disappeared when he found his footing on the surface. From the top of the cliff, the view of the canyon was stunning. It was too bad he never intended to return here again. 

Outside the entrance to the mech, Ratchet held a breath to steady his heart. Every atom in his body wanted to move away, to go back to the ship and keep his distance from this place. An unexplainable weight settled in his chest, the blood coursing through his heart turned to heavy oil as he stared down the open door before him. Entering the homes of the deceased was part of how Lombaxes paid respect. Yet somehow, it felt like an unforgivable transgression.

 _This is the easiest part_ , he reminded himself. His instructions were simple: find the items inside that seemed to hold the most sentimental value, bring them back to his ship, and then plant enough bombs in the mech to blow the place skyhigh on his way off the planet. Not too difficult for someone with an arsenal like his own. 

But the small act of stepping into Alister’s home already felt like trampling over his memory. Ratchet just hoped he’d be able to commit to the blowing up part of the process when the time came.

Finally, he pushed himself to go inside. If there was anything different about the interior from the last time he was here, it was the _mess_. The room he remembered as being generally well-kept was now in total chaos. Bed sheets were crumpled into a ball in the corner of the bed. Random broken objects covered the floor. On the back wall, Alister’s research on the Great Clock was in disrepair. Ratchet recognized this to be the same mindless destruction that had laid waste to the interior of Aphelion’s storage area. No fight had occurred here, no desert monsoon had rolled through to destroy everything inside—Alister had done this on his own. 

This could only have happened after they rescued Clank. When Ratchet told Alister he would no longer help him in his quest to reverse time, Alister must have returned here in the height of his dejection. The consequent ravaging was the result of learning the only way to rectify his mistake was beyond the bounds of possibility. 

Carefully, Ratchet stepped around the numerous artifacts on the metal floor. The idea of moving something out of place terrified him. Was he really meant to take things away from here and then destroy everything else?

Another deep breath. Alister had once carried the privilege of being born and raised on a Fastoon populated with other Lombaxes. He died trying to save them from his mistake. He deserved the Lombax funeral he had likely expected after his death. Ratchet was determined to give it to him, even if it meant pushing through his own feelings in regards to post mortem ceremonies.

He surveyed the room slowly, eyes peeled for anything that looked like it could hold precious memories to the deceased. There were small trinkets and souvenirs here and there, items similar to Ratchet’s Eudora stature, but nothing that really stood out as being _important_. Lombax funerals required the presence of sentimental objects. What was he meant to do if he couldn’t find any?

Alister’s ship was empty. On his person, they found only his hoverboots and the pocket watch with his photo of Kaden inside. He had to have _more_. Unless, of course, he just never had enough time. Ratchet couldn’t ignore the possibility that Tachyon’s attack had been so sudden and quick that the survivors were forced to leave with nothing but their ships and the clothes on their backs. In that case, all of Alister’s personal belongings would be gone. Scavengers had picked the planet clean years ago. Even if Ratchet managed to locate his residence on Fastoon, there would be nothing waiting for him but cracked walls and barren rooms. 

No. His things were here on Torren IV. Ratchet just hadn’t looked hard enough yet. 

The research on the Great Clock was too damaged—and arguably now irrelevant—to bring back to Aphelion. None of the trinkets on the floor seemed significant, either. He was getting ready to give up when he looked down to his feet in thought and—

 _The hoverboots_. Alister had kept Kaden’s hoverboots in the chest to the left of his bed. Time had been on his side during his escape. Ratchet just had to get into the chest to find its treasures inside. 

The other chests had been opened and their items thrown all over in Alister’s fury, but the one to the side of his bed remained shut and closed tight by an electronic lock. When he tried to activate it, it beeped at him and demanded a spoken password. These were easy to crack with the right hacking tool, but he at least wanted to try.

“Alister,” he said. A negative beep. “Kaden. Lombax. Fastoon. Dimensionator. Clock. Great Clock. Praetorian Guard. Elder Councilman. Meow.”

More negative beeps. With a sigh, he summoned his hacker bug from his compressor unit and attached it to the lock. The password was most certainly in Lombax. Even if he could guess the right word, he would never be able to translate it properly for the lock. His bug would just have to do the work for him. 

The small gadget whirred as it kicked into gear. After a minute, it chirped happily and fell back into his palm. It blinked away into his compressor unit and Ratchet reached forward, hands gripping the top of the now-unlocked safe. He couldn’t bring himself to lift it. Once again, everything about this situation felt _wrong_. 

It clicked all at once.

When he was ten years-old, one of his elderly neighbours passed away in her sleep. Towns were small, and since everyone knew everyone else, Ratchet had found himself invited to her funeral. The ground on the Kyzil Plateau was too rough to dig into, so the neighbour's body was burnt to ashes and spread around her tombstone. The tombstone was poised at the edge of a cliff, surrounded by others, whose many names were unfamiliar to Ratchet at the time. He watched with the whole town as the ashes were slowly blown over the edge of the cliff, some floating into the air and some falling down, the entire ceremony done in silence until the last ash flew away and the real celebration began. 

The ashes carried her onto the next stage of life, but it was of the utmost importance that her personal possessions remained untouched. Her house was entered to collect the corpse and then never entered again, not by her family nor by her friends. It remained there, lost in time, until Ratchet flew off to find Quark with Clank. Intruding on the realm of the deceased was a horrible offense, an action only taken by vile and wicked people with no respect for the dead. Whenever he’d gone into town, Ratchet had often wondered what the houses of the dead looked like inside, but even he knew better than to let this curiosity go unchecked. This wasn’t a matter of self-control. It was a matter of basic morality. 

And here he was, about to delve into a dead man’s most treasured belongings. He could reason with himself with reminders as to why he was doing this. This was the Lombax way. What was disrespectful on one planet was not always disrespectful on another. Yet, as he tried to will his arms into pushing up the lid, he froze in place. 

There were moments when his Lombax identity felt foreign to him. For the first two decades of his life, his only identity had been as _Ratchet_ . His sense of self was internalized, based solely upon his personality and interests. It was only when he entered the Polaris Galaxy that his identity became external. Being a Lombax, the _concept_ of being a Lombax, was forced unto him by others. The first time he was told he was a Lombax—the first time he’d ever heard the word—was Tachyon explaining to him why being so meant he deserved to die. 

Suddenly, his interests in engineering and mechanics were no longer his interests because he was Ratchet, they were his interests because he was a Lombax. Everything he had once thought to be because of _himself_ was now a result of nothing more than his heritage. People that met him for the first time no longer asked for his name, or age, or occupation—they asked him how he’d _survived_. In Polaris, there was no longer Ratchet. There was only a Lombax and the insignificant soul within it.

Ratchet tightened his grip on the chest cover. The ice cubes keeping Alister’s body cool were melting. He didn’t have time to lament like this.

This was not Veldin. This was Torren IV. Opening this chest would not desecrate Alister’s memory. It would honour him. 

It took less than a second for the chest to open. The weight of culture on his shoulders, Ratchet sunk to his knees and peered inside. On one side, the chest was filled with medals, dog tags, and other memorabilia from what Ratchet assumed was Alister’s time in the Praetorian Guard. The other side was more varied. A box of old recipes. A folded quilt with several names engraved into it. Half of a stylized bolt that he recognized as the Lombax equivalent of an engagement ring.

The items inside made him bite the inside of his cheek. With the way it was divided, it almost seemed like Alister had two identities as well. Alister the general, and Alister the person. At least this made Ratchet’s decision much easier. 

He reached inside and grabbed the medals of the highest esteem he could find. Then, he grabbed the bolt and the blanket. The guide didn’t call for many things. What he could manage to fit into his arms seemed like a good way to gauge a limit.

Before he left, he looked around the room one last time. Guilt swelled in his gut for what he was about to do. His status as a Veldinese Lombax had never felt so contradictory. His Veldinese half told him this was a sacred place worth protecting. His Lombax half told him this was a sacred place worth destroying. Unfortunately, he could find no synthesis. He had to follow Lombax customs out of respect to Alister.

Constructo Bombs flew every which way from his compressor unit. They stuck themselves to the floor, to the ceiling, and all along the walls. Blinking red lights indicated they were on standby. They would not explode until he activated them. 

Squeezing the items in his arms tight, Ratchet left the mech and made his way to the edge of the cliff. He kicked his heels together to activate his hoverboots and floated back down to Aphelion. With Clank’s help, he made room on the passenger seat for Alister’s things and then settled back into the pilot’s chair. He toggled Aphelion’s autopilot and inputted Fastoon as the destination. 

He rested his head and shut his eyes. The thrusters shook the ship and the momentum pushed him even farther back into his chair. 

Only when he was certain they had achieved flight did he trigger the dozens of little bombs in Alister’s mech. He did not hear the explosion, but the Constructo interface in his suit assured him it had taken place. Alister’s home was gone. 

He could feel Clank’s eyes on him. He hid himself away by covering his face with his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

But he didn’t know who he was apologizing to. 

**PART III: THE EXPERT.**

**A Markazian awaited him on Fastoon.** As they walked down the wide streets of the city, she slipped her hand into his and squeezed tight. A silent reassurance. _It’ll be okay_ , she told him, and he believed her. 

“We’re getting close,” Talwyn said. She pointed to a tower-like building at the end of the road. “It’s right down there. Not too much longer until this is all over.” 

_This_ encapsulated not only the funeral, but everything he’d been through during his time in the Polaris Galaxy. The Dimensioner was gone. Tachyon was defeated. The only other Lombax in the universe was about to be buried. There were no more tragic mysteries to bring him back to Fastoon. By nightfall, the funeral would be over and Ratchet could finally _rest._

He really, _really_ needed a vacation. 

Like most of the buildings on Fastoon, the memorial building where Lombaxes had once immortalized their dead was in a state of disrepair. Its doors were blown off their hinges and its exterior walls riddled with large holes from explosive devices. It was disappointing, but he couldn’t quite rationalize why. Tachyon had no reason to preserve sacred Lombax sites. Realistically, he had every reason to destroy them. 

The stone stairs leading up to the door were broken and covered in rubble. They ascended carefully, stepping around loose rocks and rebar on their way to the top. He was about to step onto the platform when he heard Talwyn scream. Before he could see what had frightened her, her arms were connecting with his chest and roughly shoving him down the stairs.

He crashed into a particularly large chunk of stone. His hip and shoulder took the brunt of the impact, but he could barely process the pain before he heard the familiar _hiss_ of his suit releasing nanotech into his body. A soothing sensation washed over him and when it faded away, it was like his fall had never happened. He jumped to his feet and climbed the stairs two at a time, anxious to get back to Talwyn and find out what had caused such a reaction in her. 

“Wait!” she yelled from the top. He stopped dead in his tracks, almost tipping forward from the momentum. “Be careful. Come up the way I did, and don’t step to the side when you get here. There’s an unexploded ordnance.”

“A what?” he shouted back. 

“A bomb,” Clank responded from behind. “It dropped but did not explode as it was meant to.”

Now aware of its severity, Ratchet was careful the rest of the way up. Talwyn offered her hand again and guided him to a safe part of the platform. 

The unexploded bomb was partially hidden by the rubble. Round and grey, it was almost invisible to the untrained eye. There was no doubt that he would have detonated it if Talwyn had not stopped him. 

“Wow. Thank you,” he breathed. He got a little closer and observed its details. As expected, the familiar trident symbol of Tachyon’s empire was engraved into its shell. “Do you think there are more?”

“If there’s one, there will be more,” Talwyn said. “We should keep our eyes to the ground when we move. I don’t feel like dying to Tachyon _after_ we’ve overthrown him.” 

By mistake, he entertained the thought. Death was not a stranger to him. It was as familiar as a childhood friend, a cold embrace with an eternal grip he was too weak to break. It was death that had ripped him away from his family and Fastoon, that had guided Clank to him, that had launched them on their first quest into space together. It would be with him for the rest of his life, until it finally pulled him under and he ceased to exist. Being honest, it didn’t scare him as much as it should have. He’d long since accepted that living a life as dangerous as his own meant that death would always be waiting at his doorstep. 

It could come in the form of old age, of a gunshot wound from pirates, or even a random ship crash in the depths of outer space. Unfortunate, but no reason to feel sorry for himself. There was only one circumstance of death that inspired any form of inflamed resistance within him:

Death by Tachyon. In his list of acceptable ways to die, his death always came as a consequence of action. He could die from aging, from combat, from driving his ship just a little too fast—these were processes in which he was an active participant. To die because someone had a vendetta against his species was too passive to be satisfactory. 

Talwyn had tried to keep them a secret, but he’d eventually stumbled across testimonies from insiders in Tachyon’s regime that were presented to Meridian City courts after the fall of the empire. In detail, the testimonies described the ways in which Tachyon was able to reduce the universe’s Lombax population to the measly three it had been by the time Ratchet was an adult. Scouts in hologuises were sent to distant planets and star systems, where they used bioscanners to hunt down every Lombax that had sought refuge outside of Polaris. Once found, the Lombaxes were detained, imprisoned, and held in place until Tachyon arrived to deal the final blow himself. 

Ratchet had survived due to pure luck. He was determined to keep it going. Someone could kill him for being _Ratchet_ , but he refused to let his life end because of a factor so incredibly out of his control as his _species_.

It was a little too tragically reductionist for his taste, thank you very much.

Now extra mindful of his steps, Ratchet entered the memorial tower with Talwyn. The building was many stories tall but short in diameter, appearing to be barely wide enough to fit Aphelion inside. Thin, long pillars stretched from the ground to the top, where they extended through slots in the ceiling.

At first glance, it didn’t look like a place to remember the dead. He struggled to figure out how to begin any of the funeral processions until Talwyn turned on a flashlight and pointed it to one of the pillars. 

“Look here,” she instructed him. She gestured for him to get closer to the pillar. “Can you read it?”

Following her light, he got close to the stone pillar. Its exterior was covered in small tiles not much larger than playing cards. Each tile had a few words written in Lombax and what also appeared to be a family crest of some kind. He realized, now, that Talwyn was testing him. She wanted to see if he could remember how to read the Lombax characters she’d taught him all those months ago. 

He sounded them out slowly. “Ma . . . lo . . . Kha . . . lin . . .” _A name_. 

“Kha _lim_ ,” she corrected. “But otherwise, good job. I was worried you’d forget everything while you were away.” 

“Being around another Lombax was enough pressure to remember, trust me,” Ratchet said. He reached forward and traced his gloved fingers over the engravings in the tiles. “What are these, anyways? Gravestones?”

Talwyn stood beside him. “The closest equivalent we’ll find, that’s for sure,” she said. “Lombaxes didn’t really believe in immortalizing the dead. They only started to build towers like this after receiving tons of refugees from the Great War.” 

Cultural osmosis. The Great War had finished a little more than fifty years ago—all of these deaths were recent. He moved around the pillars and read the names of the deceased, wondering if any of them were people Alister had known. It was a shame, really, that Ratchet didn’t know his Lombax name. If any of his family members were here, he would have no way to tell them apart from anyone else. 

“What’s the plan, then?” He looped back around to stand by her side. “Are we giving him a tile?”

She turned down her light and turned to face him. There was a reluctance in the way she spoke, like she wasn’t sure how to word her thoughts. “I . . . I can’t really make that call. I need you to do it.”

His stomach coiled. “Why? What else is there to do?”

“When you called and asked for my help, I came to Fastoon right away. I visited every memorial tower on the planet. Out of all of them, this was the only one still standing. The rest were destroyed.” She rubbed her face with her hands, the way she did whenever something confused or exhausted her. “It seems so easy. The other ones are ruined, so we should just immortalize Alister here instead. It makes sense, but it just feels _wrong_. I really don’t think this place is meant to still be here.”

Ratchet glanced to the entrance, where the unexploded bomb sat on the staircase. “Well, Tachyon certainly tried, didn’t he?”

“The other buildings weren’t destroyed by bombs. They were destroyed by blunt force.” She held out her hand. “Give me your wrench.” 

At the thought, his wrench materialized in his hand. He passed it to Talwyn without question. “What are you doing?”

From her own compressor unit sprang a bent piece of metal. Lombax engravings reflected in the light. A tile from one of the other towers. 

“Tachyon got to this city first. The attack on Fastoon wasn’t completely simultaneous—the other major cities only fell around half an hour after this one. Not enough time for most of them to leave, but enough time to do what some of them felt needed to be done.” She kneeled and placed the bent tile on the floor. Holding one side of the omniwrench’s head, she gently lowered the other half until it rested squarely in the tile’s depression. A perfect fit. “I think the other Lombaxes destroyed the towers on their own. The tiles here are only intact because they didn’t have enough time to try.”

He imagined another memorial tower, structurally sound, but with each and every tile destroyed by a Lombax wrench. It struck him as illogical. “I don’t get it. Why would they do that?”

Talwyn continued to look at the wrench and tile, seemingly deep in thought. She sighed. “I can’t say for sure. Based on what I’ve read, Lombaxes believed in forgetting the dead as a means of maintaining social cohesion. Fastoon is a pretty hard planet to survive on, and too much grief could tear groups or tribes apart, so they avoided the mourning process all together. No funerals, no graves, no traditional jewelry to memorialize the deceased; once someone died, they were meant to be erased from your mind forever. It’s harder to be sad about someone dying when it feels like they never really existed in the first place, you know?”

Back on Aphelion, he’d forced himself to remember Alister’s death to overcome the hardest period of the grieving process. He hadn’t realized this was a uniquely Veldinese reaction. Would a normal Lombax have pushed Alister’s name out of their mind in order to accomplish the same goal?

“Basically, I think it was tradition that pushed them to destroy the tiles. A cultural duty,” Talwyn continued. “Do you understand why I’m so conflicted?”

An oppressive weight settled on his shoulders. “If we can’t give him a tile here, what are we supposed to do?” 

Talwyn stood up. “That’s the judgement call I need you to make. If I ask you a weird question, do you promise to answer honestly?”

He met her eyes. In them, he could hear a silent plead. _Answer honestly, but please answer_ correctly. 

“I will,” he promised. 

“Do you believe Alister was honourable?”

He didn’t need to consider the question. “Yes! Of course.”

With a small smile, she handed back his wrench. “Then I know just the perfect place. Come on, let’s head back to Aphelion and I’ll give you the directions.” 

She turned and exited the tower. As he moved to follow her and ask her what she was talking about, his boot kicked the dented tile on the floor. It skidded until it hit the wall. Now alone in the tower, he tried to imagine himself among a group of terrified Lombaxes mere minutes from meeting their ends. Had the groups that destroyed the tiles been in communication? Or was the pull of tradition so strong that dozens of Lombaxes, all at once, felt the need to destroy these places? If he’d been born and raised here, would he have participated? 

He thought of what Talwyn had just told him. This tower stood only because of Tachyon’s speed decimating the local population. He’d always assumed the tall buildings on Fastoon were the Lombaxes’ legacy, and their state of ruin Tachyon’s. Perhaps this wasn’t always the case. 

On the way back to Aphelion, Talwyn regaled him with stories of the place where she was taking him. But his mind remained only on the tower they’d just left behind. 

In the wide streets of Fastoon, Ratchet came to an abrupt stop and stepped away from Talwyn. He summoned the Alpha Diruptor from his compressor unit and turned around. 

He scoped in. Then he aimed for the unexploded ordnance. 

**PART IV: UNDYING REVERIE.**

**Fastoon’s surface was covered by an unnatural desert.** Several thousand years ago, before modern Lombax civilization developed, the planet was covered in dense forests and freshwater lakes. During this time, Lombaxes rose to dominance among the local fauna and used their impressive intelligence to kill their planet almost as swiftly as any natural disaster. 

Doughts, poor farming practices, and abuse of vegetation eroded away the topsoil on the planet. It didn’t take long for most of the animals and plants on Fastoon to die. Had the Lombaxes not discovered the Undying Reverie, they too would have succumbed to oblivion.

“Well, that’s what the history books say,” Talwyn concluded from the passenger seat. “Post-desertification, it wasn’t a huge struggle to find food. Desert animals still existed. The struggle was finding water. When they found the Undying Reverie, the Lombaxes were on the brink of extinction. It taught them how to pump water up from the ground, and effectively jump started their new civilization. It’s probably the most sacred site on all of Fastoon.” 

The explosion that engulfed the memorial tower rang in Ratchet’s ears. “And no one destroyed it?”

Talwyn shook her head. “Lombaxes wouldn’t dream of doing it harm in a million years. To an outsider like Tachyon, it probably looked like nothing more than a patch of grass in the middle of the desert. It’s called the _Undying_ Reverie for a reason.”

Alister had survived every kind of assassination and execution plot known to man, only to ultimately die at his own hands. It only made sense to bury him somewhere too stubborn to die. 

At Talwyn’s guidance, Ratchet brought Aphelion to a slow stop. She touched his arm before he could kick open the cockpit window. “I know this has been hard for you. But it’ll be worth it. I promise.”

He placed his hand over hers. “Thanks for helping me. Where would I be without my little Lombax expert?”

As she began to protest, he popped open the window and jumped to the ground. He walked around the ship and came face-to-grass with the Reverie. 

The Undying Reverie felt like a hallucination. Waters steamed down a grassy hill into a pool below, where mud turned into grass and flowers and small bushes that continued until it hit a rock barrier separating it from the sand of the desert. Historically, it was a place of life. Presently, it was a place of death. 

Talwyn guided him into the Reverie. They stopped by a bed of wildflowers, where she prodded the earth with her food and encouraged Ratchet to do the same. “Do you feel that?”

He followed suit. “It feels a little . . . off.”

“The soil here doesn’t go very deep. What you’re currently touching is actually the grave of a very old Lombax general,” she told him. He jumped back in shock and she laughed. “Don’t worry, he won’t come back to life and bite you. This entire place is a graveyard. Lombaxes normally cremated their dead, but if you were honourable or successful enough during your life, you were sometimes granted the privilege of being buried in the Reverie. Your decomposing body would feed the earth, the Reverie would live on, and then so would Lombax civilization. A sacrifice to the worms, really.” 

The Court may have exiled him, but Alister deserved to be buried here. He’d died trying to fix his mistake, trying to bring back the Lombaxes—what was more honourable than that?

Ratchet nodded firmly. “All right. You pick a spot. I’ll bring the body.” 

He returned to Aphelion and entered through the back. In the storage area, he waded through a thin layer of water to get at the storage unit attached to the wall. He unclipped it, and on the count of three, used all of his strength to lift it into the air. Alister was heavy enough on his own. The several litres of water and thick metal container didn’t make carrying him down the ramp and back to the grass any easier. 

By the time he returned, Talwyn had marked off the four corners of the earth that would become Alister’s grave. Once he put down the container, she summoned two shovels from her compressor unit and offered one with a sheepish smile. 

Right. He’d almost forgotten about the digging portion of burials. 

It took an hour to make the grave. When it was ready, Talwyn compressed the shovels away and instructed him to retrieve the body. It was time. 

Ratchet unfastened the container lid. As he lifted the top, his vision blurred. He shut his eyes. Held his breath as his chest tightened. Gripped the edge of the container tight and tried to ignore the way the water splashed over the edge and soaked his gloves, seeping through his skin and filling his lungs and absorbing all the heat in his body until a violent shiver passed through him in the heat of desert. It felt ridiculous, trying to hold back his sobs during a funeral. Talwyn had seen him cry. Clank had seen him cry. So who—

The question answered itself when he opened his eyes. The white-and-red Lombax floated in ice-cold water, eyes closed in death yet looking ever so alive. Ratchet tried not to think about how at this time twenty-four hours ago, Alister was well and alive and driving him and Clank to the Great Clock. How a week ago, they were exploring caves and riding hoverboots over dark cliffs together. How fifteen days ago, Ratchet had thought he was the last Lombax alive and then proven wrong for such a horribly brief amount of time. 

Well, he _tried_ not to think of those things. He did anyway.

He dipped his arms into the water and lifted Alister’s body. Ratchet hadn’t touched many corpses in his lifetime, but he would always hate the way they felt so _normal_. Death was a physical process, albeit a slow one. Ratchet knew that Alister was dead, but aside from stillness, it would take a long time for him to seem that way. His fur was still soft in Ratchet’s hands, skin loose and bones beneath it strong. In reluctantly morbid fashion, he wished the lethal currents of time had done physical damage as they stole Alister’s life. His death would feel less deceitful if his body was full of bullet wounds. 

With Talwyn’s help, Ratchet lowered the body into the grave. He allowed himself one last look at Alister’s body before he grabbed a shovel from Talwyn and began the burial procedure. 

That was that, he supposed. Alister was gone. 

It felt a little anticlimactic. 

When they finished, Talwyn put the shovels away and put a hand on Ratchet’s shoulder. “We’re almost done,” she promised him. “Just one more part of the ceremony and it’ll be over.” 

“There’s more?” he asked. He couldn’t quite figure out what there could even be left to do. 

“His sentimental items,” she reminded him. “Do you have them?”

Oh. He hurried back to Aphelion, where he grabbed everything from the mech, as well as Alister’s hoverboots and pocketwatch. He returned to Talwyn and followed her instructions to place them atop his newly-formed grave. 

“After Lombaxes discovered the Undying Reverie, they allowed ceremonies for the recently deceased. What’s important, though, is that these ceremonies didn’t celebrate the dead. That would be culturally taboo even to this day. No, these ceremonies celebrated the act of _forgetting_ the dead,” Talwyn said. She gestured to the pile of personal items on the grave. “After someone died, their family would gather and burn their possessions. This was the most popular death ceremony in Lombax culture until the attack, so it’s what I thought we could do today.”

A heavy feeling churned in his torso and threatened to swallow him whole. _Guilt_. 

His breathing quickened. His gaze cast downwards to the items on the grave, and static passed through his shoulders and down to his legs, a freezing sensation as he failed to process what he was just told. The quilt, the military medals, even Alister’s hoverboots—Ratchet could live with himself if he destroyed these things. But he would rather defy all tradition than let the pocket watch turn to ash. 

A hand touched his arm in a comforting gesture. “If this is too hard, we don’t have to do this. I’m not exactly an authority on all things Lombax, but I’m sure they’d forgive you if you chose to stop here.”

He kneeled and took the pocket watch into his hands. Gently, he opened it and ran his thumb over the laminated photo inside. “I suppose we’re not allowed to keep pictures of them, either.”

Talwyn kneeled beside him. “Technically, no. But like I said—”

“I can’t stop here,” Ratchet asserted. “Alister was a Lombax that cared about other Lombaxes and did Lombax things. I need to do this for him. It doesn’t matter how I feel about it.”

“Those all apply to you too, you know,” she said. Her voice was soothing, and he recognized it as the one she used when she calmed him down from nightmares. “Growing up in another galaxy doesn’t change the fact that you’re a Lombax. How you feel about this kind of thing _matters_.”

He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the photo. “Growing up in another galaxy _does_ matter. I don’t think he meant to, but Alister made me feel like a bit of an outsider. He understood why I couldn’t speak Lombax, but every time I did something not very Lombax-like—like enjoying swimming, because apparently that was just unthinkable to them—he looked at me in this way that always seemed _disappointed_. I tried hard to fall into place, but it never really happened. It was like there was this invisible standard that I could never reach.”

Her responses came slowly. “A standard of . . . being Lombax?”

A quiet hum of agreement. “People like to spend a lot of time telling me how much I act like a Lombax. But then when I finally got to meet one, I felt like an imposter. It’s hard to describe. It’s like I am, but I’m not at the same time. Does that make sense?”

“I think I get it,” she said. “A pure Lombax in the eyes of others, but a lesser one in the eyes of Lombaxes. I just don’t think it’s very true.” 

This managed to tear his attention away from the pocket watch. There was no malice in Talwyn’s expression—only sympathetic curiosity. “What? Why?”

“It’s no secret that Alister blamed himself for what happened to the Lombaxes,” she began, continuing to hold his stare. “So when his best friend’s son returns from Solana and he can’t speak Lombax, and he doesn’t act like a Lombax, and he doesn’t even know the basics of Lombax traditions because he had to be sent to another galaxy to avoid being murdered, whose fault is that? Surely, you can’t be blamed for the circumstances of your early childhood. But he can be blamed for his hand in creating them.”

Ratchet thought back to the first day he knew Alister, when the elder had slipped into Lombax during a long-winded explanation about using the hoverboots. Listening had struck Ratchet with a sort of mortal terror, as he recognized some of the sounds from Talwyn’s lessons and realized that Alister had mistakenly assumed he understood. At the end of Alister’s explanation, he’d turned to Ratchet for a confirmation of comprehension, only to be met with the blank stare of someone lost in a language they didn’t know. 

Alister’s smile disappeared, his shoulders sagged, and he turned his head to look away as Ratchet stumbled over his words trying to explain that he’d just never _had the chance to learn_ — 

It didn’t matter. Alister never spoke in Lombax again. 

Ratchet had always assumed this was his fault. He was a Lombax only in body, and Alister had every right to feel disappointed that the only other member of his species he’d encountered in more than two decades couldn’t even count to fifty in their native language. Now with Talwyn’s theory in mind, he remembered his interactions with Alister differently. 

When Ratchet jumped into a deep pool of water without thinking, and Alister could only huff and turn away at the sight, was he really upset that Ratchet was carelessly breaking Lombax tradition? Or was he upset because he was to blame for Ratchet's foreignness?

Maybe this was why Alister had found Ratchet so easy to kill. Ratchet wasn’t meant to be this way; he should have been studying in Lombax universities, helping his father with Lombax inventions, and getting ready for adulthood with his Lombax friends. Instead, he was burying half of the universe’s Lombax population in the dirt and it was Alister’s fault. 

_Kill you now, save you in the past._ Everything about Ratchet’s life was wrong, and Alister was perfectly content with ending it in order to save it. No wrong way to right a wrong, he supposed. 

Talwyn leaned over and tapped the pocket watch. “You know, Alister wasn’t much of a traditional Lombax either.”

He looked back to the pocket watch and laughter erupted from within. “Holy shit. You’re right!” 

In his very hand he held the synthesis he searched for. Alister was a Lombax that did Lombax things and cared about other Lombaxes, but he was also one that defied death rituals and secretly committed cultural taboos. Were the recipes in his chest his, or did they belong to his parents? Was the guilt now on the dirt his own creation, or one taken from a deceased friend? Ratchet wondered if he’d mistaken the two halves of Alister’s personal chest. Perhaps his identity wasn’t separated by his ties to the military, but rather by individuality in a society with enforced social cohesion. One half served as his loyalty to the Lombaxes, while the other served to represent his personal contradictions. 

He thought he was doing this for Alister, but upon looking at the watch and the hoverboots before him, he wondered if he was making the wrong choice. Would Alister really want these things to be destroyed? Or did he want his memory to live on in the objects he left behind? 

Alister was a man that blamed himself for the deaths of millions of people. His desperation in the Orvus Chamber was simply a manifestation of every ounce of guilt he’d accumulated during his years in exile. In a way, this was his first sign of non-Lombax-like behaviour. The Lombax method called for willful forgetting, a death-driven amnesia that Alister had never quite mastered. It wasn’t brash thinking or violent tendencies that had led to Alister’s downfall—it was his failure to liberate himself from grief. 

The Veldin tradition suddenly made sense to him. The Veldinese preferred a confrontation with grief, one that would last several months or even years until the grief was nullified and banished from the heart. Lombaxes destroyed the artifacts of the dead with fire and weapons, a physical removal from the world. The Veldinese destroyed these artifacts emotionally, conquering them in a slow yet deliberate manner. Two completely opposite processes with one end result: reconciliation between the past and current realities in the wake of someone’s death. 

It was here that Ratchet found his synthesis. Carrying the items of his deceased best friend seemed like nothing more than treacherous self-torture to a Fastoon-raised Lombax like Alister, but to a Veldinese Lombax like Ratchet, guarding the items of the dead was an important part of the grieving process. He would see them everyday, would remember them in sudden moments, and think of them until the hurt surrounding them went away. And then, in Lombax fashion, Alister’s memory would dull and fade to the back of his mind where it could do no harm. 

He stood. “I’ll keep the watch and the hoverboots,” he said. “The rest can go.”

Talwyn uncompressed three items: a tub of lighter fluid, matches, and a full Hydrodisplacer. “So we don’t burn the rest of the place down,” she explained. 

Ratchet picked up Alister’s hoverboots and put them to the side. Grip on the pocket watch tight, he poured the lighter fluid over the rest of his belongings. They shined in the light as he struck a match and threw it onto the pile. 

The fire burned bright and high. Ratchet watched the flames flicker and came to his final conclusion. 

He would move on, but he would never forget Alister. If it was unnatural for someone who looked like him, so be it. 

He was a Lombax either way. 

**Author's Note:**

> i know the ending is rather weak, but like i said, this is mostly just self-indulgent and i didn't want the conclusion to wind on for too long. 
> 
> thank you so much for reading! soon i will hopefully write a more coherent story for the fandom, like a plot-focused multi-chapter of sorts!
> 
> thanks again!! <3


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